Official Report

Staying on as drummer-boy for your pranks,I request you dock my pension several ranks,insofar as not for the bottom line, rather it’sby order of the one who dwells above,my hands contract with arthritis,my rheumatic ankles cave.

and it gets left unfinished.
Or the fabric’s been damaged by sunshine,

by snow, wind, wet
weather, radiation, malice, dry cleaning, 25

or by time, as per ‘The
days are unpicking the fabric

bestowed by Thee’,6 and all there is left
is a hole.

3.1. Lover of Wisdom, the veil of
skill-woven culture’s so threadbare.

There’s private-parts chaos and shame seeping from every rent.7

4. Textile is text and it’s life. A doctor should weave it whole. 30

1. See the Latin dictionary. Cf the name of
Goethe’s grandmother.

2. Cf what
Nabokov called ‘the Lethe library’.

3. I call
these people ‘the fools’ (see Archpriest Avvakum). [In his autobiography, this
is one of the terms Avvakum uses to refer to his enemies.]

4. Cf, cf,
cf, cf, cf.

5. (…)
Ivanovich (1937—?).

6. Brodsky. Also
cf Pushkin’s ‘hair shirt’ and ‘singer’, which probably go back to Horace’s purpureus pannus. [Loseff refers to Pushkin’s
‘Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet’: ‘A huckster is this time of
ours, and in this iron age/if there’s no money there’s no freedom either./And what
is fame? A brightly-coloured patch/on the singer’s ancient hair shirt. In his Art of Poetry, Horace condemns ‘purple
patches’, purpureus pannus, literally
‘purple rag, cloth’.]